Annakey laughed low, uncomfortably, thinking to make light of it. “We are not children,” she said. Areth did not smile.
Annakey stopped pretending it was nothing. “No,” she said, trying to pull her arm away.
Areth put his mouth close to her ear. “Your mother and father are dead. There is no one to protect you.”
“You speak like a robber boy,” Annakey said angrily.
“Seen! Seen!” Tawm called. Annakey was on the ground and running almost before he cried out. Areth was quick after her, but then Manal seemed to appear from nowhere. Annakey hit the barrel, gasping for air. She saw Manal exchange a word with Areth. Areth turned and went in the direction of home, and that is when he began to let winter live in his heart.
When everyone else had. gathered around the barrel, Manal said, “It is too dark to play anymore. We must be up early for the fields.”
“Once more,” Renoa said.
“Yes, once more,” the other girls said, except for Annakey, who had not learned how to follow Renoa.
The boys drifted away. “Good night, Annakey” some of them said, ignoring Renoa.
Renoa stared after them a moment. “We girls will play once more, then,” she said at last. “Annakey, now you will be seeker.”
The girls vanished into the shadows. Annakey counted and then began seeking. She was joyous. For the first time in a very long time, she had laid aside the burdens of an adult and played like a child. She looked behind the trees and in the bushes. She looked near the river, behind the boulders, among the village ovens still smelling of bread, and under the drying trays heavy with shriveled fruit. She looked in all the favorite hiding spots until the moon had ridden some of her slow arc across the stars.
She found no one.
Finally she called out: “I give up! Renoa! Hasty! Willa!”
There was no answer. Annakey waited, and then looked some more. She stood by the barrel until the common fire was no more than glowing ash. Finally, she heard a rustle in the grasses.
“Renoa?” Annakey said, smiling into the dark.
“It is me, Manal. I heard you calling.”
“Manal, I cannot find any of them. Come, help me. . . .”
“They are not hiding,” Manal said. “I saw them at Dollmage’s house. All of them.”
Manal said nothing while Annakey realized that they had played a trick on her.
In the meantime, I had been treating Renoa and her friends to a hot barley drink on my stoop. At first I thought their laughter was high spirits, until I listened to their talk. I went to fetch Annakey myself. My heart could be kind toward her when I knew she was sad and frowning, but when I opened the door, I saw her walking home with Manal. He was saying such things as to make her smile despite her hanging head and drooping shoulders.
My pity drained away. Everything that made her sad found a way to lead to smiling, smiling, smiling.
Annakey was shoveling manure in my chicken coop the next day.
“If your mother had not died,you would not have to work this way,” Renoa said to her. “But then, she brought it on herself.”
Annakey ignored Renoa and attended to her shoveling. She had learned over the years that it made her unhappier to fight back than it did to endure Renoa.
“Do you like to work for Oda the egg-woman?”
“She is very thrift,” Annakey said after a moment.
“Dollmage says she will give me a toffee doll today when I have learned a few things,” Renoa replied.
I called, “Come in, Renoa. It is time to work.”
“Now, Dollmage Hobblefoot? It is such a beautiful day.”
“Time is running short. I am old. If I died tomorrow, what would you do?”
“You won’t die tomorrow, Grandmother. You are young and strong. Please, let me be with my friends just an hour longer and then we will begin.” She was smiling at Annakey, and it made her voice sweet.
“Very well,” I said. “You may have one more hour.”
Renoa had learned already about armature, which is the frame or body core of a doll, made of metal or wire or wood. Later that day, when she had played a little, we would spend some time on pigments. I would teach her to bind it with egg white, and perhaps I would teach her how to make gall ink. Tomorrow I would teach her to make a peddler doll, with an apron full of pockets into which would go pins and buttons and small things. With a peddler doll, these important things would never get lost. Even if you mislaid them and forgot to put them back in the peddler doll’s pockets, they would reappear there. It was one of my favorite tricks of the trade.
Still later, Renoa would make a pauper doll, of rags and odds and ends, to remind her to be generous to the poor. After the pauper doll, I would teach her to make nesting dolls to give to a child who was not growing well. She could make a moss doll to give to a hunter so he would not get lost.
In my dreaming I did not hear what was going on in my own backyard until it was too late. Looking out I saw Renoa and several of her friends standing around the chicken coop, watching Annakey work. They were laughing at her.
Annakey took her shovelful of manure and dropped it on Renoa’s feet. Then the girls were laughing at Renoa instead, and her face was blank with rage. Before I could poke my head out the window again, Renoa stepped forward and pushed Annakey into the muck. She pushed her so hard her whole body was covered. Even her hair dripped with chicken manure.
Annakey was not smiling. For a moment she sat, stunned, in the manure. She moved her hand and seemed to pick something filthy out of the manure. She looked at it, brushed it off a little. The girls watching her shrieked and groaned and made make-sick sounds. Annakey stood up and walked away.
She walked to the end of the village. People laughed as she went by, thinking it had been an accident. She did not notice, for her mind was fast upon the thing she had found in the chicken offal. She walked past Oda Weedbridge’s house. She walked to the end of the valley to where the mountains begin to bunch up their toes, and into, the pathless forest. She walked until she reached the place where the river comes down from the mountain, until she came to her secret place.
When she was there she washed the thing she had found in the manure and put it into her sheep’s meadow.
It was the same little man she had swept up in my house years ago, the one I had thrown into the yard. She studied the man doll, and studied it more, until she knew.
How many times had Annakey desired to fill her meadow with sheep or cows or goats, and then remembered that she must not disobey me. Now she would not keep her promise, for she knew the man doll was her father, and she would make a valley for him and a story for herself.
Annakey bathed in the cold river until she was clean. For a long time she sat by the river in the sun, until the pain in her chest eased. She touched her promise doll on the thong around her neck and stared at the little man doll standing beside her sheep. Comparing the two, she could see that the sheep was the work of a child, accurate, but withholding something. She took more clay from the river. She made another sheep.
This time she felt different. As her hand caressed the slippery clay, she felt a wisdom in her eye, a love in her fingers, a cunning in her wrists and thumbs. This time she thought less about accurate imitation. Now she thought about a sheep, how it was to be a Sheep, to know all the little grasses blade by blade, and to be able to pick them one at a time with your teeth. She knew the smell of field and wood, earth and leaf. She was a sheep, smelling the earth, tasting it. She felt her dainty hoof treading among the gilly mushrooms, the tickle of a ladybug in her ear, and the pain of hoofrot. She knew the taste of bluebells, saw the dew that gathered in the dimples of the earth—wine, sweet wine. She felt the warm, musky comfort of her fellows all round, ever-round day and night, safe, safe.